The welfare state was always a compromised social formation—corporate profits and the public good, privatized “affluence” and collective social provision pulling in opposite directions. It depended on the continuing growth of private capital to create the wealth that the state then redistributed. However, the redistributive impact of the welfare state cannot be underestimated: it proved one of the most successful peaceful social transformations of modern times. For this reason, it was seen by its conservative opponents as an unwarranted intrusion by the state into the prerogatives of capital, private property, and the “free” individual and as an attempt fundamentally to shift the balance of social forces toward the working classes and the poor. They determined to reverse this damaging initiative and to destroy the consensus that developed around it. Some would argue that this long vendetta is still working its way through the political system today.